Road to a Bachelor’s Kitchen: Meal Maker – The last-minute saviour!

Cooking food heavily depends on an initial phase of testing one’s skills in buying “bargained” healthy-cum-fresh stuffs. This activity takes away a lot of time consequently losing interest in doing anything further, especially if it is done on a weekend. One out of many alternatives is to go to a grocery shop and shout out loud, “Bhaiyyaa!! Zara 250 gm soya bean dena!!!”. Yes you got it right! Soya chunks or Meal maker is a best option when it comes to easy shopping and easy cooking as well. However I want to complicate this journey a bit with a twist of Green peas. So adding things or not is at your discretion.

One must pack in the following ingredients (Please note that this journey is only for 4 people):

a.       Grated onions (2 no.s)

b.      Grated tomatoes (3 no.s)

c.       Ginger-garlic paste (Half a teaspoon would do)

d.      Bay leaves (1-2 no.s)

e.      Cumin seeds

f.        Dry chilli (1-2 no.s)

g.       Meal maker (Soya chunks) (200gm)

h.      Green peas (add in as much as you like)

i.         Green chilli, Turmeric-Coriander-Garam masala

Please remember that it doesn’t matter if the cooked content can’t be finished in one go. Eat it again!! It saves time and energy.

Get the Soya chunks ready!

Get some water to boil and add soya chunks + some salt, and leave them until the water starts to boil. This is done to soften up the chunks. Now filter out the hot water and add cold water to the soften chunks. Rinse them off in water and then squeeze them out to remove moisture as much as possible. Now heat some oil in a pan and add the semi-dried soya chunks; it’s time to shallow fry them!! Keep on mixing the chunks with a spatula for about 3-5 mins. This process helps in removing the peculiar odour of soya chunks.

Time for some real action

Heat some oil in a pan and to it add bay leaves + dry chilli + cumin seeds. Let the flames be on ‘medium’ mode for the entire paragraph. Cook them until the kitchen is filled with the aroma of cumin (not to the extent of burning them!). Now it’s time to add ginger-garlic paste and cook the mixture till you get the same feeling (as mentioned in previous sentence). And then there goes the grated onions; cook until they turn golden brown. Now add turmeric and coriander powder and mix everything well. If the mixture turns too dry turn the exhaust fan on and then add a bit of water!! Grated tomatoes are next on the list followed by addition of finely chopped green chillies. The reason behind having grated stuffs is to add thickness to the curry so even though grating is a laborious task to do (unless you got the mixer grinder) but the hard work is worth it.

As the mixture starts leaving oil, add some soaked peas into it. This is followed by addition of semi-cooked soya chunks. Cook the mixture with lid closed in medium flame for about 15 minutes. The moment, you feel that things are getting dried up (possibly after 15 mins) add some 300-400 ml of water. If you wish to add more water, then better cook rice instead of chapattis along with this. It’s time to turn on the heat; here comes the ‘high flame mode’. Cook for another 10-15 minutes with lid closed. Now add half a teaspoon of garam masala and mix well. Oops it seems I forgot to add salt but wait a second, I had already added some salt in the beginning and there are lots of spices being added to the gravy. So first taste the gravy for salt and let the #SALTBAE in you rise up (provided your hands are waxed!) and sprinkle salt as per your convenience.

Nothing can be better than coriander leaves to season the dish, adding more flavours to it. Well now it’s time to cook some phulkas and masala papad to savour along.